Visitors might notice that Jacksonville has lots of trees. And there would be more trees, if I didn’t go around chopping so many down, in anticipation of my upcoming paper company. (I plan on self-publishing a very long book.)
You encounter, at its core, a subjective Reality, one based on meaning and value reflective of your own Self, not an objective universe, cold, particle-based and indifferent as science projects.
To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one's self.
The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of r...
Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable an...
Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.
Jesus always kept it real: He always responded in a way that led one to the end of ones self and presented one with a clear choice: Will I walk away feeling challenged or will I walk with Him being changed.
I am thankful when I am hungry because then I know that when I eat, the food will taste better. Life has taught me that my true contentment rests in hope, and the pleasure itself is secondary. It is self-awareness, not happiness, that maintains peace...
Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.
Going into the Republican Party National Convention, in all objective truth, our non‑winning front‑runners are the sorriest collection of stuffed shirts, empty suits, self‑gratulatory ignorami, and outright wig‑flipped ding‑dongs in the his...
Don’t say that poetry, my friend, is beautiful or powerful for there is no powerful or beautiful poetry There is poetry that strikes you, secretly with the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you rave and your self leaves you for another
Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful...
We gardeners are healthy, joyous, natural creatures. We are practical, patient, optimistic. We declare our optimism every year, every season, with every act of planting.
Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposed limitations.
Self-mortification, far from producing liberation from material things, is far more likely to cause either an unhinged mind, delusions or a masochistic taste for more suffering, experienced, of course, as joy.
Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they (I mustn't.)
The shame, embarrassment, feeling of low self-worth, and scores of "labels" we give ourselves are not fitting. I am beginning to see how I had no control over the situation. He was a big man, I was a little boy.
Remember me? I'm back to my old self again. No responsibilities, no attachments, no encumbrances. I don't want to own anything, love anyone, or get too attached to people, places or things. It's a rule that seems to work well for me.
My mentor used to say that no one can make us feel badly about ourselves unless we allow it. He lectured me endlessly that the biggest offenders to shrink our self-worth weren't others, but ourselves.
I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death. Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
